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VOL. Ill 


FEBRUARY 1915 


No. 2 


3Fm Synagogue falptl 


ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 

MAN AND AMERICAN 


STEPHEN S. WISE 


PUBLISHED MONTHLY FOR THE FREE SYNAGOGUE 
BY BLOCH PUBLISHING CO., 40 EAST 14th ST.. NEW YORK 


YEARLY $1.00 


SINGLE COPY 10c. 



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IGtnrnln: Mm anh Ameriran* 


The honoring invitation to give the address of 
tonight came to me as I was feasting upon the glad 
beauty of far-distant Venice. On the same day I 
had gone to one of the beautiful old churches facing 
St. Mark’s and the Doge’s palace across the Grand 
Canal. And there I looked at the grave of the 
great Doge or Duke Michael, for whom one of the 
two matchless columns of the Piazza of St. Mark 
had been erected. On the tomb are written the 
words: “Here lies the terror of the Greeks. Who¬ 
soever thou art who comes to behold this tomb of 
his, bow thyself down before God because of him.” 
As I stood this day at the tomb of Lincoln, those 
words recurred to my memory. But Lincoln was 
not the terror of the Greeks nor terror to any man. 
Yet we do well to bow ourselves down to God be¬ 
cause of him, God’s choicest gift to the American 
nation, America’s first commoner. 

This is the centenary of another great American, 
preacher and prophet, Henry Ward Beecher, and 
therefore I may fittingly refer to the words which 
he spoke at the death of Lincoln. Beecher said 

♦Address delivered by Dr. Wise at the one hundred and 
fifth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, under 
the auspices of the Lincoln Centennial Association, at 
Springfield, Ill. 

Copyright, 1915, by Stephen S. Wise 
23 




24 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 

“Not Springfield’s but Illinois’, not Illinois’ but 
the Nation’s, not the nation’s but the world's, is 
this man.” Though the name of Lincoln has become 
a world-wide treasure, how good it is for you to 
feel that he belongs not to the world but to Amer¬ 
ica, not to America but to Illinois, not to Illinois 
but to Springfield, to you nearest and dearest of all; 
and, because he is nearest to you, his memory spells 
duty and high obligation and inescapable responsi¬ 
bility. 

In explanation rather than in criticism of a great 
writer of another day, it was truly said—Alas for 
the man who has no shrines! Doubly, trebly true 
is this of a nation, if it may truly be said that it has 
no shrines. America has many shrines. We have 
come to love and to honor many of the great and 
the good that have made the few years of our his¬ 
tory splendid and commanding in the annals of 
human achievement. But surely there will be no 
dissenting from the thought that the two chiefest 
and holiest shrines of America are to be found on 
the bank of the Potomac and within this city of 
Illinois, twin shrines for the American people, each 
of them reverently regarded and tenderly treasured. 

What characterization of Lincoln could be more 
perfect than the word of Ecclesiasticus in which the 
latter describes the character and the life of another 
and earlier liberator: “And God brought out a man 
of mercy, a man loved of God and man, whose 
memorial is blessed. He sanctified him in his faith¬ 
fulness and meekness.” 

A man of mercy! Lincoln was that. Not only 
was he a man of mercy, but a man of infinite com- 

©CI.A3 96 0 35 

MAR-I 1915 r 0Jy 

VlAi. ) 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 25 

passion. He was a strong man, a rugged man, a 
virile man, but such was his strength that it blos¬ 
somed in unfailing mercy and compassion. 

A man beloved of God and men! This was 
Abraham Lincoln. A man beloved of God, whom 
God raised from among the simplest and the lowli¬ 
est of the people to be a prince among men, and to 
be remembered reverently and tenderly long after 
the princes of the earth shall have been forgotten. 
A man loved of God and men! Men did not always 
love him; they did not always understand him. It 
was just before his passing, as the bearer of a 
martyr’s crown, that men began to understand this 
man. But how men have loved him since! How 
the world has come to cherish him as its own! But 
it is all so obvious and inevitable. Lincoln was 
God’s man, and God’s man who can withstand? 

His memorial is blest. What better proof than 
that we are gathered in this hour, as men are wont 
to gather at a shrine, in order to do homage to one 
of the two august memories of American history, 
the earlier memory, austere and majestic, the later 
memory more human and kindly and benign. 

Saint Beuve has said, “The glory of Bossuet has 
become one of the religions of France. We recog¬ 
nize, we proclaim it, we honor ourselves by paying 
to it daily a new tribute.” May we not say that 
the glory of Lincoln has become one of the religions 
of America—a religion of the American people? 
The glory of Lincoln, who was more than President, 
more than statesman, more than martyr, is one of 
our religions. If we do not worship him, it it not, 
as Carlyle says, that “men worship the shows of 


26 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


great men; the most disbelieve that there is any 
reality of great men to worship,” but because he is 
almost too great for our homage and too lofty for 
our praise. His glory is our religion. His memory 
is a consecration of American life. 

It is well to emphasize every day, and more than 
ever at such a time as this, that Lincoln is a re¬ 
ligion in our land, lest some of us imagine that the 
railroad-dividend, or the yield of the mine or the 
harvest of the field, or the output of the factory, 
or the cash-book of the warehouse, is our religion. 
In the temple of deathless fame his memory is en¬ 
shrined. We do not know whether his bust has 
been chosen to adorn a niche in the Hall of Fame 
on the University Heights in New York; if not, it 
is because he is Fame. His tomb at Springfield is 
not less sacred and precious than the grave at Mt. 
Vernon, each a revered shrine of the American 
people, each a hallowed altar of humanity. 

Vindication of the American democracy—we call 
this man of the people, simply sublime because 
sublimely simple. Let other nations boast of their 
achievements; we point to Lincoln, the man—not 
unique, but uniquely American, matchless the 
world over, but completely, robustly, sincerely 
American. 

No miracle was he who was the inevitable prod¬ 
uct of the American people. Far greater than the 
seeming miracle of his life would have been the 
failure of America to bring forth a man equal to its 
supreme trial. Not by virtue of accident rose Lin¬ 
coln to the place of liberator of a race and saviour 
of a nation. The mission came to the man because 



LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 27 

he was the man for the mission. The unutterable 
privilege of breaking the shackles from off millions 
of slaves had to come to Abraham Lincoln, because 
of the destiny of his character—this man of rugged 
strength of character, uncompromising conscience, 
unspoiled simplicity of heart, blameless purity of 
soul, whose was the greatness of real goodness and 
the goodness of real greatness. 

Turning for a moment to a foreign estimate of 
Lincoln, which naturally is temperate and sober 
and in no sense perfervid, we find the French 
Democracy some years back casting a commemora¬ 
tive medal inscribed: “Lincoln—honest man, 
abolished slavery, re-established the Union, saved 
the Republic.” The “honest man” of the French 
characterization explains everything else. There 
is a direct and inevitable relation between “honest 
man” and all the rest. Great as were his achieve¬ 
ments, the French people rightly felt that the man 
was even greater than his works. “Honest man” 
France names him; the negro race called him 
“Father Abraham”—a title infinitely more to be 
desired than “Conqueror,” which is the portion of 
an Alexander or a Napoleon. 

We are often reminded, and not without justice, 
that there is nothing supremely great in American 
art, or letters, that the contributions of America to 
the world’s treasure-stores are all material, such as 
the cotton-gin and the steam press, the telegraph 
and steamboat, the telephone and harvester. If 
American letters have produced nothing super¬ 
latively great, we have something superlatively 
great to offer to history in the life of the founder 



28 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


of the Republic and in the life of him who was the 
saviour of the Nation and the restorer of our 
National Union. We point to Lincoln, the man. 
Beecher apostrophizes him as Illinois’ gift to the 
Nation. Lowell glorifies him as the new birth of 
our new soil—the first American. Emerson sees 
that he is an heroic figure at the centre of an heroic 
epoch. Wendell Phillips proudly hails him as the 
natural growth of democratic institutions. And 
Phillips Brooks honors him with a name above 
every other that he might have asked—this best 
and most American of all Americans. 

Lincoln was the most American of Americans. 
It cannot truly be said that Lincoln was not a type. 
God help us if Lincoln be not a type, if it be true 
that he stands alone, without fellows, without an¬ 
cestors and without sucessors. His ancestors were 
Cromwell and Hampden, Hancock and Adams, 
Washington and Franklin. His ancestry was the 
the Magna Charta and the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence. Among his forerunners were Garrison, 
John Brown, Theodore Parker; Lincoln himself was 
just and generous enough to say of his forerunners, 
the intrepid Abolitionists, that their moral power 
had enabled him to do all. 

Lincoln was chosen out of the people—the great 
American commoner, plain man of the people, as 
Emerson first styled him. To be the first man of 
a people in a land where every citizen is king is to 
be the manliest of men and the kingliest of kings— 
king by divine right, by the divinest of rights—the 
right of manhood and worth and character. Is it 
not the very Paladium of our liberty that the com- 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 29 

moner, the homespun man, may rise to the highest 
station in the land? Is it not the inspiration of our 
youth and the pride of our manhood that the com¬ 
moner, speaking for his kind, voiced the abiding 
truth: Government of the people, by the people and 
for the people shall not perish from the earth? 

As one thinks of the two shrines of American 
history, and to these others will be added in the 
years that are to come, how are they confounded 
who declare that the people whom Lincoln trusted 
cannot even now be completely trusted! How often 
have we erred in the one hundred and thirty years of 
American history in the matter of choosing the 
Chief Magistrate of the nation? Not once have we 
chosen badly. What kingdom or empire of the 
earth has done as well? Within seventy-five years 
this nation chose two men as President of the 
United States who are to stand among the world's 
immortals—Washington and Lincoln within one 
century! Match that in all the centuries of the 
earth’s kingdoms and empires. What European 
nation has had two rulers from 1789 to this hour 
who compare in moral and spiritual stature with 
these two giants of a giant continent? 

Lincoln the man is at one and the same time the 
vindication of the American democracy and of the 
dignity and nobleness of the common people from 
whom he was sprung. He proved anew that the 
uncommonest men and women rise out of the ranks 
of the so-called common people. 

How the memory of Lincoln rebukes the pettily 
arrogant and the meanly proud, who disdain and 
even abhor the common people because they are 


30 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


not nice nor yet refined nor yet cultivated! Lin¬ 
coln was not nice; he was simple, rough, uncouth, 
elemental, himself. He never talked very much 
about democracy or the common people because he 
was one of them. In the mind and speech of Lin¬ 
coln, the people were never '‘They” but always 
“We.” Lincoln was saved from the ungenuineness 
of a lip-philanthropy by his common sense, his 
most uncommon sense of humor, his utterly demo- 
ciatic spirit. 

Sprung from the people and trusting in the peo¬ 
ple, the people trusted and loved him. “They who 
trust us educate us.” They alone distrust the 
people who are not worthy of a people’s trust. Let 
not a man of the people who trusts and would serve 
them, who dares to speak of the duties of the strong 
and the rights of the weak, be derided as a dema¬ 
gogue. For Lincoln was a man of the people—not 
a blatant demagogue, not a democrat on parade, 
but so democratic, so firmly trusting in the people 
that the immortal watchword that he gave to the 
nation was the necessary expression of the funda¬ 
mental democracy of faith and life of him “whose 
genuine love of the people no one could suspect of 
being either the cheap flattery of the demagogue 
or the abstract philanthropy of the philosopher.” 
As one reviews the life of Lincoln, the prophet of 
democracy, one is moved to say that no man has 
the right to call himself a democrat who distrusts 
the people, who is fearful of entrusting the people 
with plenary power, who is afraid that the popular 
rights movement has “gone too far.” Lincoln 
trusted the common people with less reason for 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 


31 


faith than have we. We have every reason to trust 
the people, which moved him to place his trust in 
them, and one besides, Lincoln himself—the com¬ 
mon people incarnate in this type of man. 

Democracy means not the eternal sounding of 
futile shibboleths, such as State rights—too often 
an apology for a state of wrong—but the applica¬ 
tion of fundamental political principles to the work¬ 
ing out of the problems of American life and Ameri¬ 
can welfare. Democracy is to be something more 
than the pose of a hungry office-hunting minority 
or majority; it is to be the genuine conviction of a 
vast majority, not the slogan of a party, but the 
ideal of the whole nation. 

Lincoln came of a race of pioneers, of men who 
dared to the very verge of their being. We, too, in 
our day must pioneer as did Lincoln in his—not 
rashly adventurous but bravely daring in the enter¬ 
prises of the soul. Rash and fool-hardy were 
deemed the pioneers of a century ago. In truth, 
they adventured much, but only they were rash and 
fool-hardy who little esteemed the pioneers and 
appraised them low. Pioneers must we be in the 
new world of our making and of our re-creating, 
with the qualities of the pioneers who, above all, 
were the soldiers of the common weal. Not pioneer¬ 
ing for themselves, for he is no pioneer who would 
serve himself alone, but pioneers merely that we 
may occupy the outposts of new realms of the 
spirit and new regions of achievement to be peopled 
and to be blessed by the generations for which we 
shall have prepared the way as Lincoln prepared 
the way for us gathered to do him homage! 


32 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


In a very real sense, Lincoln was prophetic of 
that which is yet to be, prophetic of the new re¬ 
ligion, though he knew it not, prophetic of the re¬ 
ligion of Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Lin¬ 
coln—the religion which is summarized in the 
words—Love of God and love of neighbor. 

Lincoln was prophetic in yet another sense, for 
he was the foreseer of the newer and truer democ¬ 
racy. He struck a deadly blow at that most terrible 
of all castes, the caste of race. If we are to be true 
to his memory, we must strike other and telling 
blows at every vestige of the false idolatry of caste 
and rank. Democracy is not an institution to be 
created nor a structure to be established nor even 
an ideal to be realized. More unsubstantial, withal 
more vital and preduring than all of these, be it not 
forgotten that democracy is the attitude of the com¬ 
mon mind, that it is the aspiration of the common¬ 
alty. 

Lincoln fulfilled the idea laid down in the holy 
writ for the governance of those who are to choose 
judges and rulers of the people: “Moreover, thou 
shalt choose out of all the people men of strength, 
such as fear God, men of truth, hating their own 
gain.” 

Men of strength were the judges and rulers to 
be! He was a man of that moral strength which is 
the noblest courage—strong enough to dare to be 
in the right and to do the right though he must 
needs stand alone. Let us not forget his strength, 
who was as strong as he was simple, not only 
strong enough to carry on a mighty war to a tri¬ 
umphant close, but strong enough to oppose an 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 33 

unjust war, even though waged by his country. So 
strong was he that, refusing to be goaded on by 
his friends and unafraid of his foes, he issued the 
Emancipation Proclamation at the right hour, when 
it was destined to achieve the greatest good. Man 
of strength was he who, three days before his 
assassination, gave voice to the guiding rule of his 
life: “Important principles may and must be in¬ 
flexible” ; who, in his Cooper Union address, de¬ 
livered himself of the almost prophetic burden: 
“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in 
that faith let us to the end dare do our duty as we 
understand it.” 

Such as fear God! Fearless before man, Abraham 
Lincoln feared God. Lip-piety was not of the 
substance of his religion, nor was he given to many 
professions of faith, but he walked in the fear of 
God. Not only was he a profoundly religious man, 
the content of whose life was rooted in religion, 
whose religion flowered in the beauty of the good 
and the true, but his was a conscious faith in a 
supreme purpose. Almost might one say in para¬ 
phrase of the word of Schiller, that the churches 
were not religious enough to command his alle¬ 
giance. The question touching his day is not so 
much whether Lincoln was a churchman, but 
whether the churches of his time were Lincoln-like. 
Only to a God-fearing man could have come the 
inspiration with which he closed his second in¬ 
augural address: “With malice toward none, with 
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God 
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish 


34 FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 

the work we are in.” Such fear of God is a nation’s 
strength. 

Men of truth! Scorning to tell a lie and lover of 
truth, this man who could not stoop to think or 
to speak a lie, was little likely to act or to live a lie. 
Compromise and time-serving were strangers to his 
vocabulary. Wise but not fearful, circumspect but 
not compromising, careful but unafraid was he. 
Nothing could be unfairer than to think of Lincoln, 
as is sometimes done, as if he had been a man of 
political cunning, lacking in intellectual stability 
and moral courage. He was open-minded, but he 
was sturdily self-reliant. He was intellectually re¬ 
ceptive, but always self-contained, even as he was 
a man of the people though never common. Carl 
Schurz tells that in the first Springfield legislature 
in which he sat, he recorded his protest against a 
pro-slavery resolution, though followed by only one 
other man. So did he love truth and scorn a lie 
that when he was warned in advance against the 
consequences of his Springfield address, he silenced 
his timid friends with the unforgettable words: “It 
is true, and I will deliver it as written.” 

Hating their own gain! Self-seeking was far 
from him and the quest after gain of any kind was 
unthinkable in this lover of his country. He was 
not a President with a conscience, but he was con¬ 
science incarnate in a President. He hated the gain 
of the people’s praise, even the gain of such popu¬ 
lar good-will as would bring about his re-election, 
unless such gain could be had without the sacrifice, 
of self-respect. He was a statesman who pleaded 
ever for truth and never for victory. He would 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 35 

have shared Lowell’s scorn for the party which 
builds a platform as a bridge to victory and not, 
one might add, as a refuge for truth. The people 
could not flatter him, politicians could not frighten 
him, riches could not purchase him, ambition could 
not unsteady him, power could not dazzle him, who 
served his conscience as his king, who “held his 
steadfast way like the sun across the firmament.” 

Rightly was it said of Lincoln that his was a 
character such as only freedom knows how to make. 
If our democracy become polluted by the taint of 
caste, it will produce no Abraham Lincolns. Lin¬ 
coln fought not so much slavery as the thing which 
made it possible—the feudal spirit of caste of which 
negro slavery was only the most abhorent symptom. 
It was a noble prophecy of a tribune of the people, 
George William Curtis, that the part assigned to 
this country in the good fight of man is the total 
overthrow of the spirit of caste. It is a far cry 
from the riotous opposition to the appearance of a 
coat-of-arms, in the late thirties of the last century, 
on the carriage of a rich New York family, to the 
title-hunting mothers and fathers of our own day, 
who prefer the purchase of some negligible dukelet 
or paltry princeling to the best of men, if so be he 
bear no prouder title than that of fellow-American 
of Abraham Lincoln. 

We need today, be it said in the spirit of Abraham 
Lincoln, not a new South but a true South—a South 
that shall be true to itself, true to the Union and 
true to the principles of true democracy, a South 
that shall not have the name of democracy upon its 
lips and despotism in its heart. One thing is cer- 


33 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


tain—that the way not to prepare the negro for 
citizenship is the way in large part of the South 
which denies to the negro the right to a complete 
education, which grants him little more than the 
shreds and scraps of a rudimentary education that 
is not worthy of the name. Unless Lincoln’s work 
is to have been done in vain, the South must not 
fix upon servitude without chains as the abiding 
portion of the negro race. 

Lincoln has conferred a new dignity upon labor, 
but the new dignity of labor must include larger 
dignity and fuller life for the toiler. If it be true, 
as Lincoln said, that to secure to each laborer the 
whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, 
is a worthy object of any good government, then 
children shall cease to toil, then Northern capital 
shall cease to enslave the children of the South, 
then women must not be overworked and under¬ 
paid, must not be driven into shame from shop and 
store and factory by a starvation wage, then man 
must have a larger and larger share of the fruits of 
his labor. If we are to do Lincoln’s work, we must 
enfranchise all men, and first of all ourselves, into 
that glorious liberty of the sons of God which has 
been appointed to us, that we, the citizens of the 
American democracy, may be the emancipators of 
untold millions for all time. 

Not very long ago I was invited to purchase a 
volume purporting to set forth the genealogy of 
Lincoln. The price of the volume was to be ten 
dollars, something more than the value of the house 
in which Lincoln was born. The descent of Lincoln 
is of very little importance by the side of the ques- 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 37 

tion—how shall we avert a descent from Lincoln? 
What can we do in order to ascend to the heights 
on which he stood? This Lincoln commemoration 
from year to year will be of little value unless, in 
the spirit of the Gettysburg address, we make it 
tell by dedicating ourselves anew to the things for 
which he lived and died. The important thing 
today is not what we say of Lincoln but what 
Lincoln would say of us if he were here in this 
hour and could note the drift and tendency in 
American life and American politics. Are we true 
to him, are we loyal to his memory? 

Edmund Burke once said that during the reign 
of the kings of Spain of the Austrian family, when¬ 
ever they were at a loss in the Spanish Councils, it 
was common for their statesmen to say that they 
ought to consult the genius of Phillip II. We dwell 
in times of great perplexity and are beset by far- 
reaching problems of social, industrial and political 
import. We shall not greatly err if upon every oc¬ 
casion we consult the genius of Abraham Lincoln. 
We shall not falter nor swerve from the path of 
national righteousness if we live by the moral 
genius of the great American commoner. 

Instead of following Lincoln, we too often strive 
to make it appear that he is following us. Instead 
of emulating him we too often venture to appro¬ 
priate him. Instead of sitting at his feet as his 
disciples, and humbly heeding the echoes of his 
lips, we attribute to him our own petty slogans. The 
truth is that Lincoln belongs to no party today, 
though in his time he stood well and firmly within 
party ranks. His spirit ought today to inform all 


38 


FREE SYNAGOGUE PULPIT 


parties. He was a partisan second, an American 
first, as he is the first of Americans. Men and 
measures must not claim him for their own. He 
remains the standard by which to measure men. 
His views are not binding upon us, but his point 
of view will always be our inspiration. He would 
not be blindly followed who was open-minded and 
open-visioned. He did not solve all the problems 
of the future, but he did solve the problem of his 
own age. Ours it is not to claim his name for our 
standards but his aim as our standard. 

Lincoln is become for us the test of human worth, 
and we honor men in the measure in which they ap¬ 
proach the absolute standard of Abraham Lincoln. 
Other men may resemble and approach him; he re¬ 
mains the standard whereby all other men are 
measured and appraised. Gibbon tells us that two 
hundred and fifty years after the death of Trajan the 
Senate, in calling out the customary acclamation 
on the accession of an Emperor, wished that he 
might surpass the felicity of Augustus and the 
virtue of Trajan. Melior Trajano—better than 
Trajan! Such a standard is Lincoln become for 
us, save that we dare not hope that any American 
may serve his country better than did Lincoln. 
However covetous of honor for our country we may 
be, we cherish no higher hope for the land we love 
than that the servants of the Republic in all time 
may rise to the stature of Abraham Lincoln. 

In his lifetime Lincoln was maligned and tra¬ 
duced, but detraction during a man’s lifetime af¬ 
fords no test of his life’s value nor offers any fore¬ 
cast of history’s verdict. It would almost seem as 


LINCOLN: MAN AND AMERICAN 39 

if the glory of immortality were anticipated in the 
life of the great by detraction and denial whilst yet 
they lived. When a Lincoln-like man arises, let us 
recognize and fitly honor him. There could be no 
poorer way of honoring the memory of Lincoln 
than to assume, as we sometimes do, that the race 
of Lincolns has perished from the earth, and that 
we shall never look upon his like again. One way 
to ensure the passing of the Lincolns is to assume 
that another Lincoln can nevermore arise. Would 
we find Lincoln today, we must not seek him in 
the guise of a rail-splitter, nor as a wielder of the 
backwoodsman’s axe, but as a mighty smiter of 
wrong in high places and low. 

Not very long ago I chanced upon a rarely beauti¬ 
ful custom in the city of Florence. It was the day 
of the martyrdom “of a prophet sent by God.” A 
multitude stood before the spot where he was done 
to death—his hands miraculously uplifted in bless¬ 
ing in the very moment of torture and death—and 
every man brought a rose petal in token of rever¬ 
ence and gratitude to the martyred soul. This day 
every American citizen, every American man and 
woman and child has in spirit brought a petal to 
the grave of Lincoln, who sleeps tonight beneath 
a wilderness of love-tokens from men of all faiths 
and tongues and races and backgrounds—who are 
become one and indivisible in their love and honor 
for the memory of Abraham Lincoln. 

I have sometimes thought that the noblest tribute 
paid to the memory of Lincoln was the word of 
Phillips Brooks in Westminster Abbey when, 
pointing out that the test of the world to every 


40 


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America names Lincoln. But the first word spoken 
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word of Secretary of War Stanton, standing by the 
side of that scene of peace—“Now he belongs to 
the ages.” It was verdict and prophecy alike, for 
Lincoln is not America’s, he is the world’s ; he be¬ 
longs not to our age, but to the ages; and yet, 
though he belongs to all time and to all peoples, he 
is our own, for he was an American. 


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